Giant City State Park and the Civilian Conservation Corps

A History in Words and Pictures

Kay Rippelmeyer

Publication Year: 2010

This is a photographic and documented history of the Civilian Conservation Corps at Giant City State Park during the Depression era, complete with maps, lists of enrollees, and oral interviews of men who worked there 1933-1942.

Copyright

Contents

List of Illustrations

Timeline Relevant to the Establishment of Giant City State Park

Introduction

The dramatic landscape of Giant City
State Park has always been described in
recorded histories of southern Illinois
as beautiful, strange, and beloved grounds.
Located at the juncture of Jackson, Union, and
Williamson counties, the land defied straight
line demarcation by surveyors and road builders.
Melting glaciers...

1. The Land and Its People

An explanation attributed to “Indian
lore” in southern Illinois is that Giant
City was a battleground between the
fire god and the water god. If the sun is the fire
and rain the water, this is not a bad metaphor
for the geological processes that took place
there. Whereas Stone Fort still begs questions
about its human origins...

2. The CCC Comes to Southern Illinois

During the late 1920s and early 1930s,
regional newspapers and state publications
described Giant City State Park
as “the Playground of Southern Illinois” and
even “the Switzerland of Southern Illinois.”1
Free entertainment and a place of undisturbed
natural beauty had never been so sorely needed.
Times were hard...

3. CCC Companies #696 and #1657 and Their Camps, Giant City and Stone Fort

George Oliver was born in 1912 in Blyth,
England, and grew up in southern
Illinois mining towns—Tilden, Pocahontas,
and Marissa. His father and older
brother worked in the coal mines along with
other English immigrants who had settled in
the Tilden area. George managed to finish high
school in Marissa...

4. Work Projects

On January 6, 1934, a meeting of CCC
camp superintendents of state park
projects was held in Springfield.
Called by Robert Kingery, Illinois director of
the Department of Public Works and Buildings,
and attended by Dr. Service, procurement
officer, and Harry Curtis and R. C. Van Drew,
inspectors for the National Park Service...

5. Lodge Construction and Arrival of CCC Company #692

Joseph F. Booten, chief of design for the
Division of Architecture and Engineering
of the Illinois Department of Public Works
and Buildings, was the chief architect of Giant
City’s lodge as well as of the lodges designed at
the same time for the other Illinois state parks:
White Pines, Starved Rock, Pere Marquette,
and Black Hawk...

6. Camp Life

In 1935, after two years of operation, the
Civilian Conservation Corps was proving
to be an overwhelming success with the
public and with Congress. In April, President
Roosevelt endorsed the extension of the CCC
and expressed complete satisfaction with the
program: “The results achieved in the rehabilitation
of youth, the conservation of our natural
resources, the development of new recreational...

7. The Last Years of the CCC and Its Legacies

As Giant City State Park and the Shawnee
National Forest were made publicly
accessible by Civilian Conservation
Corps labor, so were all the Depression-era
forests and parks in Missouri, the Great Lakes
region, the south, and the west. The evidence of
CCC work is in nearly every state’s parks and...

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